Campus harassment legal but hurtful

During the last three weeks of the fall semester three "free speech"
incidents were brought to my attention. Someone late at night used an
Athena printer to reproduce digitally a large cropped photo of female
breasts and left it in a prominent place next to the printer.

One of our faculty, Professor of Literature David M. Halperin, received
telephoned death threats because of his visibility in the political
movement for gay rights on campus. Then someone mailed to a Project Athena
Indian American mailing list several pages of jokes belittling and
degrading to women.

In our present legalized and litigious climate, such acts, with the
obvious exception of the telephoned death threats, will in all probability
be upheld as legitimate exercise of the right of free speech.

But these incidents have hurt people. The women who either saw the
picture or read the jokes came to see me not to pursue "rights." They came
to tell me they felt hurt, ashamed or threatened by these incidents.

It is difficult for people who do these things to realize the effect they
have on others, and they often react with ridicule or even outrage when
they are asked about why they did it, saying something like, "Can't you
take a joke?"

There is no better reply than the Golden Rule: How would you feel if
these things had been directed not at women but at your own group? We can
expect over the next few years to be steadily engaged in an extended
discussion about conflicts of rights.

Whatever the outcome of those discussions, I hope that we will all agree
that to live in a community successfully requires understanding of the
other person's point of view, respect for the other person, even when
points of view differ sharply, and, finally, a large measure of
forbearance.

As a contribution to the discussion, I would like to say that I do not
believe people have a moral right to hurt others and that legitimacy for
such acts as I have described above is often achieved through community
silence. I am writing because, as a member of this community, I do not wish
to remain silent in the face of such acts.